Social media’s pitfalls have been on full display

Express-News Editorial Board

Published
9:42 am CDT, Friday, April 13, 2018

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook Inc., speaks during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday. Zuckerberg, under stern questioning by U.S. House lawmakers about the social network’s privacy practices, said Facebook does collect digital information on consumers who aren’t registered as users, acknowledging something that has been reported but not publicly spelled out by the company. less

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook Inc., speaks during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday. Zuckerberg, under stern questioning by ... more

Photo: Andrew Harrer /Bloomberg

Photo: Andrew Harrer /Bloomberg

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Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook Inc., speaks during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday. Zuckerberg, under stern questioning by U.S. House lawmakers about the social network’s privacy practices, said Facebook does collect digital information on consumers who aren’t registered as users, acknowledging something that has been reported but not publicly spelled out by the company. less

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook Inc., speaks during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday. Zuckerberg, under stern questioning by ... more

Photo: Andrew Harrer /Bloomberg

Social media’s pitfalls have been on full display

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In many ways, the internet has brought us closer together (hopefully). We stay in touch better (hopefully). We share photos with friends and loved ones. Shopping is easier (hopefully). We can read news articles from around the world. We can take classes and engage in a variety of perspectives.

But all those points of connection are also data points. Traces of public and private information that, as recent news has highlighted, can be exploited.

Facebook’s vulnerabilities have been on full display starting with the 2016 election and the ability of Russian propagandists to post disinformation on the site and through other social media.

We also know the data firm Cambridge Analytica mined the private information of 87 million Facebook users without their permission to build psychosocial profiles. The firm provided data to the 2016 presidential campaigns of President Donald Trump and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.

Facebook has not been remotely clear about how Cambridge Analytica collected this data.

On top of this, the profiles of 2 billion Facebook users have been scraped by malicious actors.

At the local level, the Fair Housing Council of Greater San Antonio has joined a federal lawsuit against Facebook, alleging the social media site allows landlords and real estate brokers to hide housing advertisements to certain audiences. Facebook denies the allegation.

And let’s not forget the recently leaked memo from 2016, in which a Facebook executive suggests that death — from online bullying or terrorists using Facebook — is just a consequence of an interconnected world. No, it is not.

The best assumption with anything digital is that there is no privacy. Someone is collecting and tracking data, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Having targeted ads is far better than seeing ads for products you would never buy, for example.

But the broader concern is a collective inability to understand the vulnerabilities of social media that allow bad actors to violate privacy and even manipulate public opinion.

If regulation is needed here, it’s on the back end of social media in terms of how data is stored and shared — as well as how those policies are explained to users. Privacy is a reasonable expectation, even if we all should assume it doesn’t really exist on the internet.